Doing His Level Best

From Garçon Wines, an online wine club in the U.K., comes a new wine bottle that not only fits through a standard U.K. mailbox slot, it won’t shatter when it lands. Made from 100% recycled PET plastic, the 750ml bottle weighs 2 ounces (63 grams), ⁠is environmentally friendly, and FLAT! Garçon CEO Santiago Navarro created the bottle (or, as we call it, the flottle) in a bid to engage more young consumers. Flottles are more space efficient than round bottles because they can be stacked, fitting more wine in shipping containers and on retail shelves. A hit in the Netherlands and Sweden as well as the U.K., the flat bottles may soon arrive in the U.S. Since last April, Garçon has been in talks with West Coast wine producers to use the new packaging.

The Academy Award-winning film, The Revenant (2015) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, about a frontiersman on a fur trapping expedition is partially based on:

A. Writings by an early Napa Valley pioneer

B. The life of an early winemaker in the Pacific Northwest

C. A myth of revenge from the Piedmont region of Italy

D. A California miner who became famous during the Gold Rush and eventually became a judge

Napa Valley’s first non-Native American settler, George Calvert Yount was a fur trapper and a friend of fellow fur trapper Hugh Glass, the subject of the film The Revenant and the book of the same name. Some of Yount’s writings helped inform the true story of Glass and fur traders in the West. Yount settled in the Napa Valley in 1838 and his first production of “wine” was allegedly fermented in cowhides hung from trees. In 1860, Yount hired a young Prussian immigrant named Charles Krug to help him make better quality wines. Krug went on to found his own winery, Charles Krug, in 1861. After Yount’s death in 1865, the United States Postal Service renamed the town where he lived “Yountville” in his honor.

“People who say, ‘You can’t drink the good stuff all the time’ are talking rubbish. You must drink good stuff all the time. Every time you drink a bottle of inferior wine it’s like smashing a superior bottle against the wall. The pleasure is lost forever. You can’t get the bottle back.”

― Len Evans (1930-2006), Founder of Australian Wine Bureau, Columnist for The Australian Women’s Weekly

― Len Evans (1930-2006), Founder of Australian Wine Bureau, Columnist for The Australian Women’s Weekly

Doing His Level Best

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